(5 of 5)
The Author. Sarah Gertrude Millin has always lived in South Africa. She is the Jewish wife of a Johannesburg barrister. She writes for South African papers, including the Cape Times, whose literary column is by her; also for John Middleton Hurry's very earnest and intelligent Adelphi, in London. The Jordans was her first widely read work. Last year, God's Stepchildren, a study in miscegenation worked out like an inexorable chapter from the Old Testament, was very highly praised. Sequel
ROSA—Knud Hamsun—Knopf ($2.50). The chronicles of Sirilund fishing village are still-life sketches beside Hunger and Segelfoss Town and Growth of the Soil. But Hamsun, pride of Norway, is a man to read thoroughly. This sequel to Benoni is named for Rosa because it is told in the first person by a young student that came to Sirilund just after her divorce was arranged, just before she married Benoni Hartvigsen. He is homely and humble, this student, and loves Rosa inevitably. Is she not the only beautiful thing in that village of drying fish and stuffy sitting rooms? But the centre of gravity is, as always, Trader Mack. The return of his tall, erotic daughter from Denmark, the brilliant suicide of Rosa's first husband, the burial of his great featherbed bath-tub— none of these shakes the hold of Mack, the strong silent man, over the fumblers about him. Honest British
THE HOUNDS OP SPRING—Sylvia Thompson—Little, Brown ($2). The bird's-eye view of Miss Thompson's novel is promising. A girl's true love goes to war and is reported dead. Desolate and a bit selfish, she marries with half a heart. Then the grave—which was a living one, a prison camp—gives up its dead. She finds it in her to leave husband and child, to conclude, on a veranda in Fiesole, that she was wise to relight her candle after fate had snuffed it. The story is straightforwardly written out, with honest British cliches of word, action and philosophy. It is another young woman's (Miss Thompson is 24) post-bellum retort. It will please many, but to this reviewer the younger characters seem wooden things from the hand of a very self-conscious creator. Not so the elders—Edgar Renner, an anglicized Viennese, and his wife, a sweetly arrogant English girl—with whom Miss Thompson seems more at ease. THE PENTON PRESS CO., CLEVELAND
*THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS—A Political History—Martin Hume—Brentano (54).
**MARY GLENN—Sarah Gertrude Millin—Boni & Liveright ($2).